Idea of India

Sunil Khilnani

Description

Sunil Khilnani s exciting book addresses the paradoxes and ironies that have surrounded the project of inventing India a project that has brought Indians considerable political freedom and carried their enormous democracy to the verge of being Asia s greatest free state but that has also left many of them in poverty and that is now threatened by divisive religious nationalism. Khilnani s superb historical analysis conveys modern India s energy, fluidity, and unpredictability in its democracy and its voting patterns, in its visions of economic development, in its diverse cities and devotion to village culture, and in its current disputes over its political identity. Throughout, he provokes and illuminates this fundamental question: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Asia
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351184546
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE IDEA OF INDIA
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
CONTENTS
Introduction to the 2012 Edition
Introduction to the 2003 Edition
Preface
Map: The British Empire in India Before 1947
Map: India in 1947
INTRODUCTION: IDEAS OF INDIA
ONE: DEMOCRACY
TWO: TEMPLES OF THE FUTURE
THREE: CITIES
FOUR: WHO IS AN INDIAN?
EPILOGUE: THE GARB OF MODERNITY
Reference
Bibliographical Essay
Follow Penguin
Copyright
SANJAY SARABHAI In Memory
and for KATHERINE
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE IDEA OF INDIA
Sunil Khilnani is currently Avantha Professor and director of the India Institute at King s College, London. Born in Delhi and educated at Trinity Hall and King s College, Cambridge, he was formerly director of South Asia Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. In addition to his critically acclaimed bestseller The Idea of India , he is the author of Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France , and co-editor of Civil Society: History and Possibilities and Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia . His most recent book is Incarnations: India in 50 Lives , also published by Penguin, and produced in a radio and podcast version with the BBC. He is a regular contributor to the Indian and international press.
Praise for the Book
Khilnani s disquisitions on India s democracy, economy, cities and identity are enthralling for their combination of scholarly background, muscular argument and compelling prose . . . If you were to choose one original work of non-fiction . . . on India, I would unhesitatingly recommend Khilnani s -Sunil Sethi, Financial Times
Brilliantly perceptive . . . Khilnani s book is written with verve and its clear arguments are plausible and stimulating . . . it can be read with pleasure and profit even by those who have little knowledge of Indian politics -Gordon Johnson, Times Higher Education Supplement
Khilnani writes with illuminating dexterity, wit and compassion, and India springs to life through his words . . . the book is a skilfully woven and compassionate analysis of India s troubled passages to modernity -Judith Brown, New York Times Book Review
An eloquent, persuasive argument for Nehru s improvised, permeable sense of nationhood. If India loses this identity, it will be a much less attractive place to the outsider and, more importantly, to many of the people who live in it. Khilnani is dispassionate, scholarly, never sentimental. There is a crisp wit to his sentences and he is frank about his country s failings . . . Brilliant -Ian Jack, Observer
A stimulating, subtle and wide-ranging work, which offers a sophisticated but convincing analysis of the way in which the country has developed during the last half-century . . . the most interesting study of modern India that I have read for years -Patrick French, Literary Review
Of all the books that could have been written with this title, this must be the most important and down to earth . . . Authoritative and elegantly written, Khilnani s book throws up some large ideas - Sunday Times
A masterful historical analysis of democracy in India since the achievement of Independence -Patrick Skene Catling, Irish Times
Compelling . . . Not only a must-read, but, with its sheer stylistic flamboyance, it can easily be categorized as unputdownable. It should be recommended reading not only for students of history and political science, but for all those who want to make sense of the current churning process -Chandan Mitra, Pioneer
A brilliantly compressed but elegant essay on the ideology, politics and culture of India after 1947. Khilnani has achieved the impossible task of writing something that speaks both to the experts in the field, and to complete novices -Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
How are India s successes and failures related, and how can they be explained? Sunil Khilnani s elegant and well-argued book addresses these and related questions . . . with erudition and insight -Bhikhu Parekh, Independent
No book has illuminated so clearly the assumptions on which India was first founded or the logic by which its history subsequently proceeded -Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman
SANJAY SARABHAI In Memory
and for KATHERINE
Introduction
To the 2012 Edition
Why India? Why, of all post-colonial nations, is India the country that gets taken most seriously by the very powers it once struggled against? Whether it is corporate Britain wooing Indian money by throwing Bollywood bling parties at London s Claridge s Hotel or European luxury houses like Herm s launching special sari lines for India s glamorati or President Obama choosing the Indian Prime Minister as the guest of honour for his first state banquet - the world wants a piece of India. Not since nineteenth-century america has an ex-colony moved so fast into prominence on the international stage.
Plenty of people have answers that purport to explain this phenomenon - India s scale, its software and smartness, its strategic location. But I think the real answer is more subtle and more obvious at once. It has to do with the fact that India is still here - that, unlike many new states created after the end of European empire, it has not self-destructed. What if India s current prominence has more to do with what it has avoided, steered around, than with what it has done?
When I wrote The Idea of India in 1997, I wanted to show that the founding idea of india is anchored as much in resisting certain powerful seductions - the temptations of a clear, singular definition of nationhood, of the apparent neatness of authoritarian politics, of the clarities of a statist or pure market economy, of unambiguous alliances with other states - as it was in realizing declaratory visions.
History moves fast these days - faster that it did when nineteenth-century America began its climb to world power, faster than when Gandhi and Nehru brought India to independence in the mid-twentieth century, and faster still than in the years since I wrote this book. In India, what were once gradual changes - the upswing of economic growth, the movement of Indians from the countryside to the city, the sabotage of the old hierarchies of the social order, the renegotiation of India s place and status in the world - now turn at dizzying pace.
Such historical fast-tracking has taken India to a point where it is now possible to envisage a real change in the chronic conditions of deprivation and injustice that have so long entrapped most Indians. Actually altering those conditions for the better will, however, require a run of political judgement and action as momentous as that accomplished by India s founders in the mid-twentieth century, when that remarkable generation broke India free from an authoritarian, oppressive past and set it forth in pursuit of liberty and democracy.
The grand tasks of the years ahead are daunting: managing the largest-ever rural-to-urban transition under democratic conditions; developing the human capital and sustaining the ecological and energy resources needed for participatory economic growth; contending with powerful competitor states and containing a volatile neighbourhood; defining what sort of power we wish to be in the world. It is an agenda that would test any society at the best of times. But in India s case, these tasks will have to be achieved under severe constraints of time and choice.
Ours is a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful impatience. And internationally, India must navigate a fluid arena: one where global power is rearranging itself in as yet undefined ways, where capital is restless, and where new, unforeseen threats and risks are facts of life. India will have only a sliver of time, a matter of years, in which to seize its chances. After all, the faster history moves, the more likely is one to get left behind.
The policy choices we make over the coming decade - about education, about environmental resources, about social and fiscal responsibility, about foreign affairs - will propel us down tracks that will be difficult to renounce or even revise in years to come. The aptness of those choices will depend not on India s entrepreneurial brilliance or technological prowess, or the cheapness of its labour, but on politics. Yet, at this historical moment when emergent possibilities and new problems are crowding in, the transformative momentum of India s politics seems to have dissipated.
Although the founders saw political freedom as their great goal, decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many. For India s business leaders eager to compete with China, for the middle classes who are fed up with corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate citizens who have taken up arms against the state, democracy in India is a story of deflating illusions, of obstacles and oppression. Democratic politics itself is seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.
It s a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement, and action - the capacities that first brought India into existence - seem to have deserted both the air-conditioned hallways of power and the dusty streets of protest, just when India needs them. The distinctive source of modern India s legitimacy has, to many, become an agent of the country s ills.
India s democratic discontent echoes a wider disaffection. Across the globe, democratic politics is in distress and disrepair. It is being challenged in its homelands, from the US to Europe to Japan, while in Russia and China it stands summarily dismissed. As citizens grow ever more contemptuous of their leaders, leaders readily return the compliment - complaining that they are hamstrung by the short-sighted, unrealistic demands of their citizenry. Just a couple of decades after democracy was proclaimed as the universal future - the riddle